On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Gwern Branwen
As far as Awesome and StumpWM and XMonad go, I have some random notes on pros and cons which never went anywhere: http://www.gwern.net/xmonad-advocacy
I've decided to simply delete my page. Your http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Comparison_of_extensible_window_managers is better, and I haven't worked on it in ages, nor did it ever become very good. Here's the final page source, if anyone cares: --- description: In what ways is the XMonad window manager better than the Awesome WM? ... # XMonad vs. Awesome ## pros 22:51:58 < jrick> in awesome, tabs are provided through a lua library called Tabulous. unfortunately, you can't have a "tab titlebar" at the top, so you don't know what other windows are in that group in awesome, if you break your configuration and reload, nothing loads up in XMonad, it just won't compile and you can continue using the old one awesome config file keeps changing awesome has many dependencies awesome is less reliable than XMonad, which hardly ever crashes awesome is GPL against XMonad's BSD ## cons XMonad users have to setup third-party statusbars like dzen, while awesome has a statusbar built in (this is related to the dependencies) XMonad uses virtual desktop model by default, while awesome uses tags; XMonad has tag extensions, though awesome statusbar apparently can embed Lua applications in it; eg. a (small) clone of Space Invaders. it can also evaluate lua code non-issues awesome uses XCB and XMonad Xlib; any speed advantage is unnoticeable by the user and swamped by just about anything else (like app rendering) XMonad requires learning at least a little haskell syntax; awesome requires Lua knowledge, but this may be more accessible # XMonad vs. StumpWM ## pros live hacking means you can hose your X session minimal type safety - try and pray? XMonad being compiled means easier and more reliable setup than StumpWM - interpreter setup can be tricky XMonad has smaller binaries and uses less memory than a SBCL with StumpWM loaded; this leads to noticeable performance differences on RAM-limited systems ## cons XMonad cannot really do live hacking different paradigms; possible to do static tiling in XMonad, but not nearly as easy as with StumpWM --- xmonad vs awesome http://www.ghosthacking.net/blog/entry/xmonad_vs_awesome/ -- gwern http://www.gwern.net